Monday, March 17, 2008
Cooking up a storm
FOOD! Great British Menu, BBC Two, 6.30pm Labels: BBC Two, BBC2, Channel 4, food, Great British Menu, Hollyoaks, TV
Well, about bloody time. After all that schedule mucking about with Come Dine With Me and Masterchef, cookery finally returns to its rightful home of 6.30pm, with series three of Great British Menu. Whilst this series will never top the highlight of being a competition to prepare a feast for the Queen (and later being pwned by Her Maj on Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work), it is usually entertaining nonetheless.
The saga of Jake's descent continues tonight (remember when he was merely a loveable mother killer?) after Friday's suicide/child murder attempt. Is he dead, or like all bad horror movie villains, will he live to see another day? The horror movie angle Hollyoaks has adopted with this story has actually been quite effective, with several jumps and jolts along the way. What it has utterly failed to do, however, is treat mental illness or bereavement with any sympathy whatsoever. But this IS Hollyoaks so we don't know why we'd expect anything different.
By Rad :: Post link
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Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Rimmer's Dinners
Labels: BBC Two, BBC2, Breaking into Tesco, Five, Five Life, food, Recipe for success, Simon Rimmer
CONTESCO! Breaking Into Tesco, Five Life, 9.00pm
So last week saw the finale of Masterchef (About which: Ha! Johnny made a chocolate fondant! Fool!) and new series of Celebrity Masterchef and Great British Menu are yet to begin. What, then, is telly doing to fill the foodie gap in our lives?
Well, apparently it is turning to one man, 'celebrity' (us neither) chef Simon Rimmer, who looks like the bizarre mutant lovechild of Richard O'Brien and Dominic Littlewood. This man is at the helm, of not, one, but two-count-em brand new foodie shows.
We know both of these series technically began last night (Breaking Into Tesco was on normal Five, as opposed to tonight's Five Life repeat), but as we didn't have much clue what they were about, we thought we'd wait till tonight to preview them.
Filling the gap left by The Weakest Link, which in turn is filling the gap left by Neighbours, we have Recipe for Success (and can we just remind the Beeb here that the proper allotted time for food shows is 6.30pm, not 5.15pm, or 8.30pm or anything else). This show is a bit like a low-budget version of LC-fave The Restaurant (so sadly no Maman Blanc here). Each night we see a couple trying to run a restaurant type affair and they get marked by the audience. The winning couple at the end of the week presumably go into some later stage (we kind of missed the details of the rules and the prize and all that gubbins). Anyway, it's not as classy as it's BBC stablemates (except Kitchen Criminals, it's probably a bit classier than that. Sorry Angela) but it's a bit of fun and worth tuning into if you watch Neighbours at lunchtime. Or in the evening. Or the middle of the night. Or the omnibus.
The other new show, Breaking into Tesco is actually the more exciting prospect of the two. If you can try to stomach the elements of it that feel like an extended advert for our supermarket overlords, it's actually a warm, interesting and quirky little show. The premise is that four contestants each week design a dish that they hope to get on the shelves of THAT shop. They go through various rounds, including an audience taste test, a supermarket tasting panel and a pitch to the store's product team. Along the way some of them get elimated until the last one standing goes through to a final where the winner will get their product made.
It sounds a little dull, but it genuinely isn't. It combines the competitive elements of The Apprentice with the crazy contestants of Come Dine With Me, the wacky innovations of Dragon's Den, and a little bit of Schools-programme style education. In other words, it's proper lowculture fare.
Tonight's contestants are Jolly Jenny, with her Lancashire foot (a hot pot in a pasty, basically), desperate Danni with her gluten-free-egg-free-sugar-free muffins, Jovial Jenny (#2) with her Malaysian noodle soup and Passionate Paul with his, er, cherry ravioli.
We know who wins, obviously, but they are all television gold. The only problem is that the trailer for next week basically gives away who gets to which stage of the contest, which is blatantly rubbish. Sort it out, Five. You don't get that sort of behaviour on Masterchef.
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Thursday, February 28, 2008
It doesn't get any tougher than this...
POSSIBLE SWIZZ! Masterchef Final, BBC Two, 8.00pm Labels: BBC Two, BBC2, food, Masterchef, TV
Oh Masterchef, we love you very much. We love the calamitous chocolate fondants. We love the wacky chefs who combine turnips with popping candy (we may exaggerate, but only a touch). We love the way Gregg makes that 'oooarrrgh' noise when he tastes a good pudding. We don't love the voiceover, but we'll let that pass for now. However, we have a very rocky relationship with your finals. We don't like to criticise; after all, you provide us with eight weeks of quality lead-up every year. But the climax of these eight weeks is, shall we say, a little less than satisfying.
Basically, John and Gregg always pick the WRONG PERSON, leaving such worthy contenders such as The Lovely Dean and The Lovely Hannah by the wayside in favour of the 'least likely to' out of the three finalists. Don't believe us? Check out the amount of complaints there were to the BBC (well, a few people wrote to Points of View, anyway) after the travesty of the 2006 final. And don't get us started on Matt Dawson smugging his way to winning Celebrity Masterchef that year. We don't forgive easily, so we approach tonight's final with a great deal of trepidation.
After a week of watching them mostly be a bit rubbish and occasionally be a bit awesome at various catering tasks, tonight our three finalists will be going to France in the first half, to work in 'some of the best restaurants in the world', then no doubt retuning to the Masterchef kitchen 'for one final challenge'. The decision, we can be sure John and Gregg will tell us, will be tougher than ever.
So who will win? For the uninitiated, Emily (aka 'Mud Pie Girl') is clearly the star of the show. She is cute, bubbly and creates all kinds of mad but tasty food. Gregg and John think she is awesome. She won't win. We like her, she is young, she is a woman and she has been fairly competent throughout. This will all count against her. (We know a woman allegedly won in 2005, but we didn't see that series, so we refuse to believe it).
Then we have James (aka 'Sideshow Bob'). We took an instant dislike to him in the first two rounds he was in, because he was so smug and smarmy (In later rounds he has actually proved to be quite a nice bloke but let's not let that get in the way of our initial snap judgements, eh?). We predicted from the start he'd probably win, but will he? We doubt it. He has been mostly competent and capable all the way through, and as we all know, it's the people that mess up all the way through and have a good final that win.
Our final, er, finalist is Johnny (aka 'Johnny'). A nice bloke, who has had the odd flash of genius, Johnny has still managed to make more mistakes than the others, receive less praise from Gregg and John in the early rounds than the others, but he is a bit older, he is a bloke and he has no doubt been on a 'journey'. Therefore, we predict Johnny will win.
Unless he attempts a chocolate fondant.
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Friday, January 18, 2008
How's about cooking something up with me?
Labels: Channel 4, food, gordon ramsay
CULINARY! Gordon Ramsay: Cookalong Live, Channel 4, 9pm
As you can't fail to have noticed, today marks the sad departure of Dame Vera Duckworth from our screens. At times of extreme grief, what is our natural response? Why, to comfort eat, of course. And Channel 4 has come to our aid in this time of national sadness by showing Gordon Ramsay: Cookalong Live tonight, so that after the big event you can channel your grief into perfecting those cooking skills (which will help you as you consider applying for Come Dine With Me) and then eating the delicious results. The courses you can cook are: Pan-roasted Scallops, Steak and Chips and Chocolate Mousse. Vegetarians are permitted to make extra pudding to compensate for the meaty starter and main.
The gimmick of this show is that you are meant to cook along with Ramsay, which is all very well, but how many of us have our tellys in our kitchens? (Fortunately the recipes are all available on the Channel 4 website, along with some video clips of how to make them (so you can cheat a bit, essentially).
If you want to take part in this national event and report the results to us later (mandatory), the list of what you will need is below. However, we must warn members of the lowculture Fat Fighters group to look away, as these all appear to be highly calorific:
(The quantities listed serve four, by the way, so you may wish to adjust accordingly)
200g cherry tomatoes
Small bunch coriander
Small bunch basil
1 lemon
120g rocket
4 x medium Desiree potatoes (approx 600g)
Advertisement200ml full fat crème fraiche
250ml fresh double cream
1 x pack salted butter
1 x small block of Parmesan
12 king scallops, hand-dived if you can get them
4 x good quality Sirloin steaks approx 220 – 250g each, and approx 2.5 cm thick
1 x medium bottle olive oil
1 x medium bottle groundnut oil
3 x tablespoons white wine vinegar
60g pitted black olives (Kalamata if possible)
Sea salt
Black peppercorns
Chilli flakes
20g icing sugar
2 x 32g bars of chocolate covered honeycomb (Crunchie for example)
150g dark chocolate (at least 70% cocoa)
2 tablespoons coffee liqueur (Tia Maria or Kahlua for example)
Don't feel guilty about feeding yourself up in this time of grief. You'll need the fuel to get you through the dark days ahead. Anyway, we're sure it's what Vera would have wanted.
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Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Political knife-edge
FUCKERY! Confessions of a Diary Secretary, ITV1, 9.00pm Labels: Confessions Of A Diary Secretary, Five, food, ITV1, Kitchen, scandal, sex
COOKERY! Kitchen, Five, 9.00pm
Exciting times for UK television drama at 9pm tonight, with both ITV1 and Five pulling something unexpected out of the bag and charitably offering a desperate viewing public some kind of feasible alternative to New Street Law on BBC1. Both channels seem to be working on the assumption that we’d rather watch the ill-judged behaviour of quite horrible people in quite interesting professions than a bunch of irritating, holier-than-thou, oxymoronic worthy lawyers. And we would!
Over on ITV1, it's another one of those light-hearted dramas that play up the physical imperfections, amiable personality foibles and generally ridiculous antics of key cabinet members of the past decade, in a The Trial Of Tony Blair / A Very Social Secretary / The House Of Cards vein. Following on from recent More4 programmes about the blind authoritarian one and the stuttering warmongering one, this time we delve into the private life of the big fat one with two cars as he throws caution to the wind and embarks on an affair with secretary Tracey Temple. John Henshaw seems perfectly cast as bumbling, buffoonish old John ‘Two “Johnny Prescott” ‘Prezza’ “Texan Croquet” Jags’ Prescott opposite the fantastic Maxine Peake, who ages ten years and adopts a southern accent (traitor!) to play Temple, a woman with an obvious appreciation of double garages and political heavyweights (sorry) and with an appetite for having her rump slapped. Elsewhere, there’s the usual pleasure to be gained from watching people-we-recognise playing people-we-recognise, with a Damian Lewis/Tony Slattery Blair/Brown partnership to look forward to. To think ITV used to pay rubber puppets to do this sort of thing!
On Five, meanwhile, Eddie Izzard stars as a flambéed/pickled (take your pick) head chef in Kitchen, a lengthy kitchen-set drama about a young probationer’s misadventures in a restaurant kitchen, a hotbed of kitchen drug-taking, kitchen sex, kitchen gambling and kitchen blackmail. Previews (written by people other than us, hence the quotation marks) have described it as “edgy”, “dark”, “depressing”, “slick”, “strong”, “satisfying”, “deep” and “mouthwatering”, which might sound like a lot to fit in to a single programme, but at OVER FOUR HOURS (!!!) over two nights they can probably run the gamut of human emotional experience with time to spare. Though if you're on a tight schedule you might want to stick to the political/personal satire unless you really, really like Izzard, drug-taking, sex, gambling and blackmail. Or kitchens.
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